


Skinny kid

by Stressedtoimpress



Category: Camp Camp (Web Series)
Genre: (Almost), Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Backstory, Character Study, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Completed, Dialogue Light, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, No Dialogue, One Shot, There’s like two sentences of dialogue but it’s like a retelling sort of, i don’t know, kind of, this is really sad oops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 00:00:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15762420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stressedtoimpress/pseuds/Stressedtoimpress
Summary: Max was always a skinny kid.It could be that he was naturally skinny, you know, genetics. It could also be that he has good eating habits. It could be a number of normal things.Or it could be that his parents forget to feed him.





	Skinny kid

Max was always a skinny kid.

It could be that he was naturally skinny, you know, genetics. It could also be that he has good eating habits. It could be a number of normal things.

Or it could be that his parents forget to feed him.

Whenever he got home from school, there was a 80% chance only one parent would be home, an 18% chance no one would be home, and a 2% chance they’d both be home—but that two percent never went well.

He rarely had dinner. Usually when he got him from school, whichever parent that’s home would pay him no mention. No “how was your day?” Or “do you have any homework?”

Nothing

Usually whichever parent it was was locked up in their bedroom watching TV. Occasionally they’d be in the kitchen grabbing a beer, or walking down the halls to get to the kitchen or the bathroom, but the house was usually quiet.

Sometimes he did get fed. 40% of the time whichever parent was home would throw some microwave dinner in front of him, and then go hole up back in their room to watch TV again.

The other 60% of the time he just went hungry. He was a kid, he was too young to feed himself—not to mention he got yelled at if he so much as touched the refrigerator.

He couldn’t ask to be fed either. He tried asking his mother to make him dinner one time and it didn’t go over well. She just said “I don’t have time for this shit, you ate at school,” and slammed the bedroom door in his face.

He never asked for food again.

Actually, he never asked for anything usually. Not after the permission slip incident.

One time in first grade he asked his mother to sign a permission slip for a field trip. She just told him that she didn’t want to pay the five dollar bus fare and pushed her cigarette against the paper, putting it out and burning a dark circle where she was supposed to sign.

If neither of them were home then there was no 60% chance he’d get food, he just sat in his room reading or doing his homework if he felt like it, but he usually didn’t feel like it. He spent a lot of time doing a whole lot of nothing.

Whichever parent wasn’t home would usually return late at night. Sometimes he’d hear them fumble down the hall and into the bedroom in the dead silence. If neither of them were home they never returned at the same time. Sometimes they wouldn’t return until the next morning.

Before school started, he thought that having only one parent home most of the time and not always getting food was normal, and that was just how life was.

When he turned five he started attending school and learned about the ideal family unit. A mom and a dad who go out and made money and were all home for a nice family dinner by six.

Then he realized that maybe he should be getting three meals a day and not talking to your parents all day wasn’t exactly normal. That was called neglect.

Nevertheless, he lived with it. He didn’t want to try speaking to his parents about it because anytime he asked for something from them they yelled at him. He thought about telling the teacher, but at the time he was rather shy, so he figured it wasn’t that bad and just went home like normal.

He always ate lunch at school, that was the one meal he could always count on having, unless it was the weekend. Sometimes he went one or two days without eating on the weekend if his parents forgot to feed him dinner, because they didn’t feed him lunch or dinner and he never have breakfast either. His parents were either asleep or out of the house in the morning, so on weekends he just sat in his room, and on weekdays he always just grabbed his bag and went out to meet the bus

Every day he walked himself down to and home from the bus. It was dangerous for a kid like him, walking down the city streets all by himself, sometimes in the dark if it happened to be winter. He was confronted by some not too nice people multiple times, but he always denied them so nothing ever happened to him. Maybe it was because there were a lot of witnesses so they couldn’t grab him, maybe they just weren’t in the mood to go through all the effort of taking him if he wouldn’t come willingly, or maybe he just got lucky.

I guess some time in third grade he realized that no one was forcing him to go to school, so he stayed home for the day. Sure enough, his parents didn’t notice he was still at home. He just stayed there all day, and no one noticed he didn’t show up.

Well, except his teacher. When he wasn’t there for attendance, she had the principal email his parents. It took them a day or two to realize he wasn’t going to school, and boy he was strictly reprimanded for that stunt.

They had a meeting with the principal, talking about truancy and deviant behavior and whatnot. Max tried to tell the principal the real reason he didn’t come to school for a few days was to see if his parents would notice, but as soon as he opened his mouth his father shot him a death glare that told him it would be wise to keep his mouth shut. They said he was very sorry and it wouldn’t happen again.

As they were walking down the parking lot from the school, his parents scolded him, telling him they they didn’t raise him to be a delinquent (Max wanted to point out that they didn’t raise him at all, but he had learned enough to know that wasn’t a good idea) and that behavior such as that should be punished.

As soon as their speech was over his mother backhanded him across the face.

It took Max a moment to register what just happened.

His mother hit him.

Even 8 year old Max was old enough to know a parent shouldn’t do that.

He brought his hand to his cheek. It was stinging. He took his hand away and saw blood on his fingers.

He was bleeding.

Later that night when he looked in the mirror he saw a small scratch under his eye from his mother’s fingernails.

It wasn’t much, but it left a mark. You would think that people would ask how he got a scratch under his eye, but no one did. He was a rowdy kid, and he always got into a lot of trouble at school, so no one questioned it.

That’s when Max realized he was truly alone in the world. No one cared about him. His parents didn’t feed him, he didn’t talk to anyone at school, and the teachers never really cared about him unless he was breaking the rules.

By fourth grade Max had grown into a bitter kid. He was spiteful, and snapped at everyone who talked to him. His sarcastic remarks were cold, and he tended to drop a few curse words he picked up from his parents into casual conversation.

This led to him having no friends. He never really had any, but by fourth grade he had driven away anyone who ever thought about being his friend.

He only got into more trouble at school. Trouble for swearing at his classmates, trouble for not returning from recess, trouble for throwing rocks at people during a game of tag, the list went on. Every time his parents were called to the principal they just said that they’d try and teach him better, and that was that. He got yelled at every time another deviation was added to his record, and every now and again he’d get a good slap in an attempt to set him straight.

By fifth grade he was swearing like a sailor, and knew more about the world than the rest of his classmates. I wouldn’t say mature, so to speak, but definitely more aware of the fucked up things in this world because he was forced to grow up too fast.

On the first day of the summer before sixth grade, he was done living every day with his parents barely noticing him, sometimes never speaking to him the whole day.

He figured if he pulled a stunt so huge that everyone else noticed him, they’d be bound to finally pay attention to him.

The next day he stole as much food from the fridge as he could and stuffed it in his backpack before heading out to wander the city. He was running away.

He didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he knew how to follow street signs if he got lost, and he knew which street he lived on so he knew how to get home.

For three days, no one came looking for him. He slept on park benches and snacked on raw salami and carrots, drinking water from the water fountains placed throughout the city.

By the fourth day fliers started going up about a missing kid, and by the fifth there was a news report up. He decided it was time to finally go home.

He followed the street signs home and returned at three am. He wanted his parents to welcome him and hug him and say “we missed you so much!” like the parents in movies do when their kid runs away, but he was only met with spite and disdain.

His father was drunk off his ass and not happy to see Max. Max was yelled at severely. It wasn’t the “where have you been? We were so worried!” Kind of yelling, no.

It was the “where have you been for the past fucking week you little shit? What made you think it was a good idea to run away, not to mention you fucking stole from us! What if the police got involved? Then what? I’m so tired of this shit, why can’t you learn to just behave! We tell you to behave and you can’t even do that right! You can’t do anything right you worthless piece of shit! I swear if you pull another fucking stunt like this-” kind.

That’s when his parents decided they didn’t want to deal with him and tossed him on a bus to some shoddy summer camp for the remainder of summer. He was a burden and he knew it.

When he got to camp, he was expecting to be alone again. He was expecting that no one would care about him, but he was met with the opposite and oh how it confused him.

To start, he wasn’t expecting to actually have friends. He was expecting every camper to just push him aside like every other kid he’s ever met, but surprisingly—they didn’t. They liked him. Some were even like him.

He wasn’t expecting to actually make friends with Nikki and Neil either. He thought they’d just be his partners in crime for a little bit before they went their separate ways, but no. They insisted they were his friends, and even when Max tried pushing them away like he did everyone, they stayed by his side.

So they were his friends, and surprisingly they were a lot like him. One could say Max wasn’t exactly the best friend. He insulted them, he was rude to them, and he even betrayed them for another group of kids one time, but after all that they still stayed friends, and Max just couldn’t comprehend as to why.

But he wasn’t complaining.

And then there was David

He did everything in his best efforts to get David to hate him. He tried his hardest to make him break, it just bugged him that someone could be that positive all the time.

But it never worked. He cursed him out, insulted him, made fun of him, and he might of tried to kill him once or twice.

Through all of it, David never gave up. He was always positive, always there to help, and always wanting to befriend Max.

Max acted like it was the worst thing in the world, and he’d rather kill himself than listen to David, but secretly he liked it.

Deep down he liked that there was someone who was always there to help, and deep down he liked that there was someone giving out positive vibes to to combat all the negativity of the world, and deep down he was glad that there was someone who never gave up on him—because he’d experienced a lot of that.

He was so used to people tossing him aside at first glance, and so used to being ignored and mistreated, and so used to feeling worthless—like now one would ever want him

Even though he acted like having people who cared about him was a hassle and too much work, he was glad he had people who would always be there for him. He wasn’t exactly sure how to treat them properly at first, but he was getting there.

He may have acted like he hated that godforsaken camp, but the truth was that at camp he was the happiest he had ever been.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually wrote a whole backstory for Max’s parents if anyone wants to hear it


End file.
